The invention disclosed herein relates generally to the art of loading articles into containers and more particularly to a method and apparatus for loading fresh meat articles into flexible plastic containers. Meat articles have conventionally been manually loaded into flexible plastic packages for either shipment or display. While many aspects of meat packaging process had been refined to a high degree of automation, the actual step of placing meat articles into containers has remained a substantially manual operation wherein an operator receives the cut of meat from a conveyor, selects an appropriately sized container and slides the meat from a shelf into the container. The subsequent processing steps of vacuumizing, clipping and shrinking are highly automated but remain dependent upon being supplied from a manual container loading step.
An attempt to overcome the shortcomings of prior art manual handling of meat cuts is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,942,624 to Kupcikevicius issued Mar. 9, 1976. The apparatus described therein is a bag loading apparatus which comprises a cantilevered conveyor system such that a meat article may be placed on one end of the conveyor while a bag is draped around the cantilevered end of the conveyor. The movement of the conveyor causes the meat section to move along the conveyor. While this apparatus overcomes many of the shortcomings of the prior art, it utilizes a plurality of conveyor belts which by necessity are grooved or otherwise roughened so as to prevent any sliding during the conveying process.
In the meat handling art it is necessary to maintain extremely sanitary surfaces and the use of grooved conveyor belts is not conducive to such sanitary conditions. Another shortcoming of this device is the problems associated with tracking and maintaining parallelism of the cantilevered conveyors. An additional problem with this prior art device is associated with breakdown in a meat packaging line. Inevitably breakdowns and power failures occur, and due to the nature of the belts, meat articles must be carried across the conveyor for packaging; thus effectively causing a breakdown and bottleneck in the entire meat packaging line.